Over the last 30 years, Bruce Springsteen's career occasionally seems to have hinged not on changing tastes or fashions, but on world events. The album that propelled him to global superstardom, 1984's Born in the USA, was born out of the early-80s recession and became entangled in Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign, albeit unwittingly. The "lost decade" that began with 1992's Human Touch was brought to an end by 2002's The Rising, an album spurred by 9/11. Under the circumstances, you can see why a greater than usual degree of anticipation has greeted Wrecking Ball, trumpeted as Springsteen's response to the ongoing financial crisis.

Perhaps that eagerness also has to do with a desire for certainties in an uncertain world. Anyone hoping for a set of complex, difficult, nuanced songs in which Springsteen suggests bankers have feelings, too – admittedly a fairly improbable state of affairs, but you never know – is going to go home disappointed. Wrecking Ball finds Springsteen in full-on, never-knowingly-understated mode. He starts out bellowing crossly about the Stars and Stripes on We Take Care of Our Own: the best part of an hour later, he winds up bellowing crossly about Jesus's crucifixion. Wrecking Ball never really lets up inbetween. It invites comparison with Born in the USA: an album released in an election year, haunted by an economic downturn, which moreover opens with a song that the kind of rightwinger who only listens to the chorus might eagerly mistake for tub-thumping jingoism. What's striking is that huge swathes of Born in the USA weren't actually concerned with exposing the harsh realities of life in Reagan's America at all: they were concerned with having it off, the better to cement Springsteen as an MTV idol. Here, there's no escape into the bedroom. Jack of all Trades and This Depression depict relationships strained by economic woes. A lady in Easy Money is encouraged, as ladies so often are in Bruce Springsteen songs, to put her red dress on, but this time it's in order to commit a gunpoint robbery, which Springsteen holds as symbolic of the amoral climate engendered by the banking crisis: "All them fat cats, they'll just think it's funny."

You might suggest a songwriter who claims the sub-prime mortgage crisis has led to a collapse in morality so dramatic that armed robbery is widely viewed as hilarious is laying it on a bit thick, but, in fairness, Springsteen has never been a man fearful of getting his trowel out when it comes to the matter of rousing audiences. And he clearly thinks his audience needs rousing now more than ever. Over its 50 minutes, Wrecking Ball deploys a by-any-means-necessary approach variously involving We Will Rock You's thump-thump-crash rhythm; samples of guns being cocked and fired; a brass section arranged to sound like a marching band; a great deal of whooping; the New York Chamber Consort orchestra; snare drums beating out military tattoos; two gospel preachers; three gospel choirs including the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, practitioners of a choral tradition that makes a lot of gospel choirs sound like the very model of restraint; lyrical nods to Street Fighting Man, A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall and the Impressions' People Get Ready; Tom Morello not toting the acoustic guitar that's become a familiar sight at Occupy demonstrations, but in full-on, distortion-heavy Rage Against the Machine mode; heart-tugging invocations of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the 1887 Great Railroad Strike and the demolition of New Jersey's Giants stadium; references to the denizens of somewhere called Banker's Hill as "fat cats", "vultures", "robber barons", "thieves" and indeed "bastards" who should be shot; and a plethora of religious imagery including – with a certain inevitability – Jesus driving the money changers from the temple. Anyone thinking of making a joke about him doing everything but hiring a Mariachi band is minded to wait until the closing track We Are Alive, when something that sounds suspiciously like a Mariachi band shows up, playing the riff from Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.

In fact, you're occasionally struck by the sense that Springsteen is deliberately using as many musical signifiers of different ethnic groups in America as possible, the better to convey his message that we're all in this together (the fat cat bastards up on Banker's Hill excepted). He seems to have forgotten to whip his guzheng out in order to secure the Chinese vote, but nevertheless has a lot of bases covered. Not just gospel and Mariachi, but Italian mandolin on Jack of All Trades, Irish tin whistles on Death to My Hometown, even hip-hop: Rocky Ground features a guest rap by Michelle Moore, written by Springsteen himself, which is far less embarrassing than a rap written by a 62-year-old rock superstar who's never before shown any interest in hip-hop ought to be.

There's something equally improbable about Wrecking Ball as a whole. On paper, it all looks a bit much, and occasionally it is – a sense of "oh do give it a rest" sets in around the sixth overwrought minute of Land of Hope and Dreams – but more often it works. That's partly because Springsteen has five decades' experience in knocking out huge, anthemic songs that walk the line between stirring and – as he puts it in a sleevenote tribute to the late Clarence Clemons – "corny as hell". But there's something more than mere button-pushing at work. Wrecking Ball paints almost entirely in broad brushstrokes, but its bombast rarely seems hollow: it exists not merely to put bums on stadium seats, but in service of an anger that feels righteous, affecting and genuine. At its best, Wrecking Ball defies you not to be swept along with it.